Our Milwaukee Video Street Tour - Kinnickinnic Ave. North

The mighty Kinnickinnic Avenue - or KK as everyone calls it - is one of the more unique and colorful "angled streets" of Milwaukee, roughly paralleling the lakeshore through most of its path. Traveling south from Lapham, KK connects Southside Milwaukee through Bay View and on to St. Francis and Cudahy, with many former and current landmarks interspersed throughout the residential areas it passes through. KK still has many Old Milwaukee architectures mixed in with newer designs. Bay View, with its famous Lincoln intersection, the Avalon theater, Chet's Magic Shop, a few small parks, the old St. Francis and Cudahy banks, and the more open country feel of the approach to Cudahy with the railroad tracks running along the road all give this stretch of road a great nostalgic Old Milwaukee feel.
Here is a link to the playlist of all the videos in this series:
• Our Milwaukee
Music:
"Relaxing Piano Music"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
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What These Are
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In this series of videos, I do some street driving tours of many major arteries on Milwaukee's historic South Side. Milwaukee is my old hometown, and in many ways you never really leave. The memories remain strong, and I am especially tied to the locales - the streets and neighborhoods, the architecture and buildings, the parks, churches and highways. These videos are for me and everyone who wants to revisit those old haunts.
The area roughly encompasses from Greenfield on the north end, KK/1st/Packard on the east side, Howard/College on the south side, and 43rd st on the west side. This was approximately my old stomping grounds, the area of most of my frequent travels as a youth growing up in Milwaukee in the 70s and 80s. I had seen some other street tour videos on TH-cam and thought it might be of interest to others who remember these old hometown areas to be able to visit them again.
How These Were Filmed
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I had done some drive-arounds in the past (and even posted a few to TH-cam) with home video camcorders, but this time around I had a 4k camera and a more specific goal: to record longer, continuous sections of streets and most importantly, to record them moving much slower. I found that my previous attempts, which admittedly were just for my own archives and not meant to be seen, driving at 25 or 30mph or more resulted in a lot of blurry footage. 25mph doesn't seem very fast, but on camera it all whooshes by. I wanted to be able to better focus on specific landmarks, buildings and homes. In these videos, the goal was to move at under 20mph when possible, 10-15mph preferably. Many of these were shot at 10-15mph, but on some busier streets like 27th, which also has more large buildings/businesses than houses, I had to drive more like 20-30mph.
Filming Method
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I tried as best I could to film these as smoothly as possible (and remove redundant things like long waits at lights and camera bumps and such) but this was done in live traffic and Wisconsin roads are, well, you know how they are. :) These were basically filmed with the camera on top of a tripod sticking out the top of my sunroof, in a effort to get the clearest possible image and avoid shooting through the windshield. It also had the benefit of being a higher vantage point. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my auto focus set right, so it will sometimes blur slightly, but then it refocuses right away and comes back.
Video Editing
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Edited and outputted fully at 4k resolution, filmed at 30fps. Many cross streets are noted with an overlay, and other landmarks have animated text moving through the image to highlight them.

[@christophertyacke6019]

I grew up in Lincoln village and worked at Kohl's grocery as a bagger and I first seen Purple Rain at the Avalon theater when it came out with my girl at the time. I would ride my bike all around that town with no worries. I'd go down the hill on Lincoln avenue going west from kk on my bike to see how fast I could go, I remember 50mph was my fastest. These videos just bring back such good memories.

[@GodsUnrulyFriends]

I grew up in St. Francis, and moved to New York City in 1983. NYC is my home now, but I will always hold a special place in my heart for Milwaukee. In fact, one of my favorite things in the world to do is to drive up and down Kinnickinnic! Thank you for posting this!

[@countryside8122]

It brings back memmories. Can see a lot of things have changer from the late 70's till now. Could tell you where Jim King Chevrolet was and many other things were...lol